During the pandemic, running a supermarket became harder than ever. With waves of staff absences and threats to supply lines, keeping stores open and shelves stacked were significant challenges.
Equally, surges of panic buying affected supply as people stockpiled produce for fear of supplies running short. A series of Ipsos surveys*2 in early 2020 found that the majority of respondents expected shortages to be caused by panic buying, rather than supply chain disruptions – approximately 90% of people believed this in the UK. This belief, of course, only added fuel to the stockpiling fire.
For organic stores in particular this exacerbated a long-standing issue. As one operator explained, “When something is out of stock, customers get angry because the product is not in the store. It happens a lot in the organic sector. They are used to other supermarkets where everything is always available, but the manufacturing line of organic products often runs out of raw materials.”
At the same time, customers became highly conscious of the health risks of public areas, whether because of airborne or surface transmission and supermarket operators took on a bigger burden of responsibility for protecting their shoppers – and easing their anxieties.
That meant enforcing strict heightened cleaning standards, such as regular sanitization and restricting the handling of goods. “We had to clean the shopping carts, and we provided sanitizer at the entrance, ” one German operator explained. “In the beginning, people were scared so we cleaned more and more.”
This, unsurprisingly, put an additional strain on staff time, when staff absences were already applying extra pressure.
